December 2026
Three shows close before Christmas: Maverick Kings at the MFA on the 6th, the Athenaeum's 1974 Boston photographs on the 12th, and 1776 at the Massachusetts Historical Society on the 19th. The ICA's 90 Years and the Gardner's Book of Esther run into the new year. Harvard's On Location gathers 140 drawings made outdoors, free to see indoors as Boston turns cold.
Institute of Contemporary Art / BostonUntil 7 March
Warhol's Silver Clouds drift on ceiling fans near Kusama's LOVE IS CALLING mirror room. The ICA restages nine of its own past shows in order; the Boston Globe's Murray Whyte found "an arc with some consistent threads".
Isabella Stewart Gardner MuseumUntil 18 January
Jan Lievens's crowded feast hangs in front of a rug from Isabella's own collection. The Gardner's first major show of 17th-century Dutch art ends on its own Rembrandt, a self-portrait at 23; the Boston Globe called it "a revelation".
Harvard Art MuseumsFree
On Van Gogh's The Blue Cart you can still read a pencilled "vert clair", a colour note to himself. About 140 drawings made out of doors, from Constable's Brighton Beach to a Palmer cornfield on a card under 11 centimetres.
MIT MuseumUntil 28 March
The 33-inch wood-and-plexiglass Enterprise, built in 1964 from Matt Jefferies' designs, sat on Gene Roddenberry's desk, went missing, then turned up on eBay. The restoration kept the wear. One object, mainly for Star Trek fans.
MassArt Art MuseumFree
Two articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, spelled out in gold Mylar letter balloons tied to stools and weights, slowly deflating. Misstropolis called it "a portrait of time itself".
Museum of Fine Arts, BostonCloses 6 December
A granodiorite falcon nearly six feet tall, and Hatshepsut's quartzite sarcophagus, the only 18th-Dynasty royal one outside Egypt. Nearly 100 objects, mostly from the MFA's own Egyptian collection, follow Hatshepsut, Akhenaten and Tutankhamun.
Boston AthenæumCloses 12 December
Constantine Manos photographed Boston in 1974: a couple and school buses at Castle Island, a flag protester on City Hall Plaza, lunch at Durgin Park. The Boston Globe: "deeply human and humane without ever being sentimental or touristy."
Massachusetts Historical SocietyCloses 19 December
One of about 25 surviving Dunlap broadsides of the Declaration sits in a dark room that lights up as you walk in. Nearby are Boston Tea Party leaves in a bottle and Abigail Adams's "Remember the Ladies" letter.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Hatshepsut, Akhenaten and Tutankhamun through the art of Egypt's 18th Dynasty (1550–1292 BCE), when royal patronage drove a wave of societal and artistic change. Ann and Graham Gund Gallery.
Boston Athenæum
Constantine Manos spent nine months in 1974 photographing Boston's streets for the Bicentennial. Fifty years on, the flea markets, protests and ball games return to the Calderwood Gallery.
Carpenter Center for the Visual ArtsFree
Markele Cullins, Jibade-Khalil Huffman, Steffani Jemison and Rindon Johnson use performance, installation and screen-based work to turn the gaze into a negotiation rather than a position of mastery.
Carpenter Center for the Visual ArtsFree
Enzo Camacho and Ami Lien, Candice Lin, Cole Lu, and Ayoung Yu and Nicholas Oh treat mythmaking as a way of making and unmaking knowledge, drawing on pre-colonial, diasporic and chimeric traditions.
Massachusetts Historical SocietyFree
Handwritten copies of the Declaration by John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, a rare Dunlap broadside, letters and diaries trace how the document grew from draft to founding text.
Massachusetts Historical SocietyFree
Documents and artifacts from the Adams Presidential Library trace how Americans moved from the weak Articles of Confederation through debates over state versus centralized power to a ratified U.S. Constitution.
MIT List Visual Arts CenterFree
An anniversary display tracing the List's origins in the Hayden Gallery, founded 1950, and four decades in the Wiesner Building since it opened on 1 October 1985.
Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston
More than 50 works Fotene Demoulas and Tom Cote helped bring into the ICA Collection, with Laura Owens, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Olga de Amaral, Sarah Sze and Lorna Simpson.
Harvard Art MuseumsFree
A University Teaching Gallery installation asking what art is, why it matters, and by whom its history is written — objects chosen to be studied by Harvard students and open to all.
Old State House
Boston's flagship semiquincentennial show, made with the Massachusetts Historical Society and anchored by a rare 1776 Boston broadside of the Declaration of Independence.
MIT Museum
Instruments and artworks spanning 340 years across four sections - Earth Time, Mechanical Time, Electric Time, Atomic Time - tracing how precise timekeeping became a negotiated human construct.
Harvard Art MuseumsFree
A journey through drawings by groundbreaking 19th-century artists who left the studio to look outside for inspiration, showing how a close relationship with nature shaped artistic vision.
Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston
A new multi-panel installation by the Baltimore painter, whose "long-form painting" breaks Yosemite's Tunnel View into interrelated canvases. Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser Gallery.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Six decades of lyrical painting by Suzanne Jackson (b. 1944), shaped by a deep respect for the natural world and a belief in the interconnectedness of all living things.
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
Dutch paintings, tapestries, Persian textiles and Jewish ceremonial objects trace how the biblical heroine Esther became a shared symbol for Jewish and Protestant communities in the 1600s Netherlands.
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
In the Fenway Gallery, Israeli video and installation artist Michal Rovner responds to the Book of Esther with her own scroll works, shown alongside the Museum's Rembrandt-era Esther exhibition.
Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston
The Ugandan-born artist premieres new ceramic and wood sculptures staging a queer wedding, each figure cast as bride, groom or guest, watched over by charred-wood ancestors.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
The livre d'artiste as a revolution in book-making, seen through Picasso, Miró and Dalí — extravagant, experimental volumes that turned the printed page into an art form.
Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston
Teen artists from the ICA's Teen Exhibitions Program explore sonder, the realization that every life is as complex as one's own. Teen Gallery, Seaport Studio.
Isabella Stewart Gardner MuseumFree
A jackal with glowing eyes keeps watch from the Anne H. Fitzpatrick Facade, filmed with a night-vision camera near Rovner's home and evoking Anubis, guide of souls to the afterlife. Free to view outside.
MIT Museum
Margaret Wertheim and mathematician Erik Demaine turn fibre art, hyperbolic geometry and marine science into collective climate action, highlighting the threat to coral reefs. Opens with the OCEANS season.
MIT Museum
Immersive installations by Marshmallow Laser Feast set against 19th-century oceanographic equipment, exploring how we make sense of the earth's oceans. Opens with the OCEANS season at MIT Future Fest.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
The Swedish-Brazilian artist's playful, politically barbed work from 1960s–70s America, built on his idea of art as "a fusion of 'pleasure' and 'insight'" and made to be handled by its audience.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Fifty years of photojournalism by Donna Ferrato (b. 1949), documenting the resilience of women — particularly survivors of domestic violence — from inside shelters and alongside law enforcement.
MassArt Art MuseumFree
Articles 25 and 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights spelled out in gold Mylar letter balloons, which deflate over the run of the show. Stephen D. Paine Gallery.
MassArt Art MuseumFree
Mathematically distorted sculptures that warp familiar symbols of American identity, including new works originally conceived for the US Pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale.
MIT List Visual Arts CenterFree
Uri Aran's work is at once deeply idiosyncratic and oddly familiar: to follow it is to tinker alongside the artist, to be let in on an invention, or perhaps a shorthand between friends.
MIT List Visual Arts CenterFree
Blending documentary sensibility with poetic construction, Hao Jingban makes moving-image installations that are emotionally precise, historically incisive, and formally experimental.
Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston
Anniversary show revisiting nine exhibitions and initiatives from the ICA's history, from its 1936 founding as the Boston Museum of Modern Art through thirteen homes and its 1966 Warhol survey.
Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston
Thirty-second video portraits by Joan Logue since the 1970s, with new work filmed in Gloucester, MA, from the ICA/WGBH Contemporary Art Television Fund. First Floor.
Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology
Azadeh Akhlaghi restages eleven pivotal deaths from Iran's history, 1908-1979, as meticulously researched tableaux shot on location - sixteen photographs plus archival material.
Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston
A site-responsive commission for the Sandra and Gerald Fineberg Art Wall by the Algonquin-Anishinaabe artist, made in response to the ICA's own filled-in waterfront site.
MIT Museum
The restored original 33-inch Starship Enterprise model built for Star Trek: The Original Series in 1964, on loan from the Roddenberry family for its East Coast debut.
Harvard Art MuseumsFree
Tracing the artistic lineage of Filipino-American painter Alfonso Ossorio through a body of works that resonates across generations, in the Modern and Contemporary Art galleries.
Harvard Museum of Natural History
Rare specimens from Harvard's 26-million-object vaults, many on public display for the first time - from George Washington's golden pheasants to the only complete Lewis & Clark bird specimen.
Harvard Art MuseumsFree
How did photography construct cultural memories of postwar America? A University Research Gallery show drawn from the museums' American Professional Photographers Collection.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Seven decades of bold woodblock prints by the Japanese artist Naoko Matsubara, made across Kyoto, Boston, Toronto and Tibet and spanning nature, motherhood, music and theatre.
Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston
Eight teen artists from Artists for Humanity use color to tell stories and express emotion, at the ICA's Teen Gallery, Seaport Studio.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Joiri Minaya layers fragmented imagery from art history, science and pop culture to challenge stereotypes of Black and Brown women from tropical regions, and how exoticism and colonialism shaped them.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Kawada Kikuji's 1965 photobook Chizu, in which Coca-Cola bottles, ruined fortresses and the stained walls of the Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Dome resist any single narrative of postwar Japan.
A short note now and then when something new opens worth your time.
